


Five True Things About Sam Carter That She Doesn't Know About Herself

by Paian



Category: Stargate SG-1
Genre: 100-1000 Words, 5 Things, 500-999 words, Character Study, Community: sg1_five_things, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2007-10-01
Updated: 2007-10-01
Packaged: 2017-10-03 20:47:04
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 522
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22058
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Paian/pseuds/Paian





	Five True Things About Sam Carter That She Doesn't Know About Herself

1\. She hasn't spent her life trying to please her father, she's spent her life trying to _be_ her father, and it's not her father she takes after at all; it's her mother. Because she never got the chance to get to know her mother as an adult, and because of #2, which makes her life so different from her mother's in one key respect, it may take her a long time to figure this out.

2\. She doesn't want a life partner or children. When she thinks _I want_ what she means is _I feel that I should_. She's happily married to her career, has all the sex and deep, bonded companionship she needs, and likes the children in her extended family a lot more than she would if she had to be responsible for them full-time. One day, when she's old and grey and nodding by the fire of some distant sun, she may come to understand this, and forgive herself, and be at peace with it.

3\. She has an extraordinary and completely unrealized gift for visual arts, a raw natural talent that she will never discover because it would never occur to her to experiment with the media that would reveal it. Her astrophysicist's mind expresses its genius through the beauty of mathematics, but her consciousness swims with visions that words and equations are insufficient to convey; through brush and pigment and canvas she could share them, but she will never learn how.

4\. She used to have a mild allergy to naquadah. All those symptoms she thought were a string of headcolds in the first months of the Program were in fact an allergic reaction. She had begun to build up a tolerance by the time Jolinar merged with her, but she still might have gone into life-threatening anaphylactic shock if the symbiote hadn't cured her before it died. She's not allergic anymore, so unless some stray memory of Jolinar's drifts into her awareness someday and tells her, she'll never know.

5\. She's never been truly content to be based on Earth. She'll never be truly content to be based on the ground at all. In her heart she's always wanted to be out among the stars. She wants to go faster, farther; she wants to push past boundaries of speed and distance _and keep going_. Returning to her point of origin for a rest-and-reset after every outward push is not what she's intrinsically wired for. Compared with the Stargate Program, NASA would have been pedestrian and limiting because Earth's homegrown spacefaring technology was in its infancy; but the operational rhythm of the SGC has never suited her, and too many of the Milky Way gates are set on planets. She's too loyal to the Program, too grateful for it, too fixated on it to be aware of this, beyond a persistent low-grade itch that she never examines. But if she ever breaks free -- if circumstances ever launch her out of the gravity well of Stargate Command -- she'll be filled with all the exhilaration and joy and _rightness_ that she was missing, and she'll start to understand.


End file.
